and yet it is carried forward through this kind of trick of the budget control act, the debt ceiling deal, and all these straitjackets that have been put onto the process so that we are now two years later, even though there's not public support for it in any deep sense, it has been repudiated at the ballot box by a fairly significant majority, house, senate, and the presidential election, we have inherited this terrible policy which is going to cause needless pain and suffering. >> but it's like they've taken a machete to it across the board as oppose toed the many democrats who say, look, we know we need to make cuts in places. why not wield more of a scalpel to do it? what prevents them from doing that? >> there was this kind of weird politicalcle clati clalculation that the republicans tried to hand the president the scalpel back when the deadline was approaching and the president rejected it because he doesn't want to own the cuts. one of the things to understand about the politics is the republicans want cuts but they don't want to own them, and their biggest political goal is